Pappu , put on your dancing shoes

The Indian Value system has surely changed and how .

The most moving dialogue in the blockbuster 'Deewar' - 'Mere paas Maa hai' quite defined the value system for very many years . Gaadi , naukar , bangla , bank balance vs a 2-penny job , a uniform and Maa . The movies' cult status forever etched in peoples mind the spiritual vs the material battle and pronounced the definitive answer - it had to be 'Maa' over everything else .

That was in 1975 .

Three and a half decades later , values seem to have been redefined by a breezy new yuppy movie with newcomers called 'Jaane Tu ' .

Pappu is blue eyed , fair , wears Gucci , Rado , drives a Bmw , strings the guitar , can travel where he wants , can buy what he wants and has an MBA but - he can't dance !

A new battle of 'material and stuck-up ' vs the ' free ' .

Have and have-nots redefined .

This is perhaps a new age value - 'cool'-ness .
To chill , to relax , to fall in love .

Like the 'protagonist ' enjoying his life and its absolute mundanity .

A saturday well spent

I played the best soccer match of my life a couple of weekends ago .

My first every sporting encounter had ended in two things - a discovery of a passion for soccer and a medal . The silver medal came in my seventh standard in school in Ambala Cantt Haryana . Our captain was a burly haryanvi called Pal from the tenth standard and the team drawn from different classes of the Raman House . Pal was tall , hefty and strong . He was an able captain and everyone listened to him without questions . His sheer size gave him absolute authority and that he was a good player helped immesely . We fought hard and lost the final to a better team . I began the matches as an extra - a last minute inclusion because I enrolled quite late .I played in some matches . I still remember running a lot in the finals .

We won and I still have the medal .

Of the rest of matches in school , the most I remember was the unforgettable match in Southern Command school in Pune . Our team lost to a team six years younger . Our team of twelfth science was a motley crowd of unfit spectacled boys fighting for honour against a team of sixth graders . A self-goal , an inability to decide who should be captain , no ball control and overall sloppiness led us to a humiliating 3-0 loss .

Another Pune match stands out as remarkable - the one where we bunch of radio guys beat a software team from Onward tech on the Race Course ground 8-0 exactly as I had planned and predicted . The one played ten years ago in rains on the Shivaji preparatory military school ground was great too . But in most of these games , I would run hard , shout hard and push people hard .

That's why the Mumbai match was very different and special .

Our captain , who operates the TV studio production system , barely spoke in most matches , but was always available when a ball was passed his way to deftly weave through competition and pass it back closer to the post . We substituted every ten minutes and since the game was played in half a full soccer ground , it left us all with good energies to contribute effectively . Sixteen teams fought for a place in the final . The matches were organized such that all of them finished in a day . We played our first match at ten in the morning and won 1-0 . We then won round after round , defeating teams of varying calibre and capped it all with a closely fought 3-2 win in penalties in the finals . The opposing Private treaties team had this wafer-thin maverick Parsi footballer , Daryl , who won my immense admiration for his singularly spectacular footwork .

The crystal soccer cup proudly sits on my office shelf .

To my list of learnings on how to win a soccer match , including teamwork , ball-passing , leadership ,possession , covering the opponent and attacking from the word go , I have now added one more : Have a couple of Goans in the team . With three of our seven players being Goan -Dylan Pereirra , James Rodrigues and Salvador - each exhibiting tremendous ball control and following our strategy to a T , it was impossible to lose .These guys played soccer for a living and having them around makes winning a lot easier .

It took four days for my muscles to recover fully , but every minute that drizzling saturday was worth it .

The US economy is a train wreck

Landed on ... totallylookslike.com . Quite cool . My political hero Fidel Castro does have a striking resemblance to Daniel Day Lewis . There's Salman Rushdie with his fatwas looking eyes wide open like Stanley Kubrik . Noone will deny that Khomeini is not Bond after he has managed to keep US from attacking Iran for years while his 8-year war rival Saddam Hussein perished .And rockers have always looked like hounds .

Of all , probably the US economy one is the most closer to the truth .

Judo anyone ?

Russian President Putin just released a how-to video on judo .
Years back around the time of the 2000 Olympics , The Times of India ran a cover page headline with his photograph flooring another judoka with a powerfilled side-kick . That same front page had an article at the bottom of the page with Atal Bihari Vajpayee requesting the UN general assembly if he could sit and deliver his speech as he had severe knee pain .
And I had written in a letter to an editor the next day asking readers to guess which country amongst the two - Russia or India would win more medals in the forthcoming Olympics .
Jatha Raja , tatha praja !
Today , years later , as an unprecedented economic crisis faces the two countries both running rapidly towards capitalism like never before , Manmohan Singh has been fighting furiously . He's been dropping the CRR daily , increasing liquidity ,getting Chidambaram to front the press twice a day and pushing the US to get his pound of nuclear flesh . The fight is directed more towards the domestic markets than to any fundamental structural changes that can have any consequences in the futrue . The new Russian prime minister meanwhile got his armed forces to move into Arctic circle and lay claim on the Oil sources there , ensuring a robust domestic supply and a say in world politic for years to come .
Oh ! These russians .
Around two weeks back , a Norweigan ship with an Indian crew was hijacked by pirates around the coast of Somalia . The Indian crew on board is living in constant fear of losing its lives . The wife of the captured Indian captain has been appealing to the Indian govt to do something and we are dithering on who to approach and what to do . At around the same time a Russian ship got hijacked by Somalian pirates in the same waters .
Guess what Putin does ?
He's speedily sent a warship to surround their pirated ship in an attempt to tire and blow the Somalian pirates out . Ransom be dammed . The pirates attempted to dock the ship to take away the precious cargo - 33 Russian T-72 tanks , but the Russians aptly thwarted that attempt . They also enlisted help of neighbourhood US warships to surround the Somalians and starve them .
As the battle wages in the high seas , one just wonders why we aren't an active race .
Be it sport , economics or pirates , adjectives like 'Incredible ' , ' Emerging ' work well with India , but verbs like ' attacking ' , ' controlling ' don't .
Judo lessons , anyone ?